In India, ‘sex’ is still a topic that people don’t discuss openly. Men clearly don’t want to talk about their sexual problems as according to them their masculinity will be questioned and if women start talking about ‘sex’, well that would be called sin. But nowadays, filmmakers are trying to make movies that revolve around sexual problems.
In 2017, we saw Shubh Mangal Saavdhan that dealt with the issue of erectile dysfunction. A few months ago, there was Khandaani Shafakhana and now, it’s time for Made In China.
Mikhil Musale directorial Made in China is about a Gujarati businessman Raghu (Rajkummar Rao) who along with his cousin brother visits China and there he meets a man who tells him about a product that will help men to be better in bed. Raghu decides to get this product from China and sell it in India. Will his business be successful? Will he become a big entrepreneur? Well, the movie moves forward answering all these questions.
Writers Mikhil Musale, Karan Vyas, Niren Bhatt, and Parinda Joshi have come up with a good concept and have converted it into a good screenplay. But the movie has a few flaws. The first one has to be the pace. While in the first half the pace is good and it keeps us hooked throughout, a few scenes in the second half are quite slow-paced and fail to keep us engaged. Also, the runtime of the film is just 129 minutes, but still in the second half, the movie looks stretched.
Mikhil Musale had earlier directed Wrong Side Raju, a Gujarati film which won a National Award. With Made In China, Musale tries to give the audience a dose of every genre in one film. There’s drama, there’s romance and there’s comedy. He successfully narrates the film and most importantly gets the perfect Gujarati flavour in the movie. We have mostly seen that when a filmmaker who has earlier made a regional movie, his Bollywood debut also looks like a regional film. But thankfully that’s not the case here. The problem with such movies is that while from the first scene they show things in a very light-hearted way when it reaches the climax the film becomes a bit preachy.
Talking about performances, Rajkummar Rao and Boman Irani are the souls of the film. The former as Raghu is very good. His accent and the mannerisms of a Gujarati guy are perfect, and he doesn’t go overboard. Irani has proved his mettle as an actor, but we haven’t seen a strong performance by him in the past couple of years. However, in Made In China, he shines and how. As we said earlier that the climax looks a bit preachy, it is actually Irani’s performance that saves the climax and keeps us hooked to the screen. Mouni Roy is good in her part and she has been given a couple of scenes to shine. Paresh Rawal and Gajraj Rao are strictly okay in their cameos and Sumeet Vyas is fine in his role.
Coming to music, while most of the songs in Made In China are recreated versions of old classics, thankfully they haven’t been ruined. From Odhani to Sanedo to Valam, all the songs are entertaining.
Overall, Made In China is a well-intentioned film and it also entertains. But the zest is missing here.
Ratings: 3/5
Watch the trailer here…
